The art of writing

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

THE ART OF WRITING

The

Art of Writing

George Randolph Chester

*

The Publishers Syndicate

Cincinnati, Ohio

1910

^

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY
THE PUBLISHERS SYNDICATE.

£CU316792

Foreword

I find, in going over the following pages,
that I have taken a most authoritative
position; that, in some cases, I have writ-
ten with apparent conceit and even apparent
arrogance. I shall not change the passages
which might seem to justify such conclu-
sions. I have tried honestly and earnestly
to set down the results of my experience in
such a manner that they should be of ac-
tual help to those who wish to make a suc-
cess of short story writing, and so have
written frequently in the first person, and
with vigorous decisiveness, wherever I
wished to impress very forcibly certain
points. It would be possible to remove my
personality from these pages, but in doing
so they' might be made less forceful; ac-
cordingly they shall remain as they are,
without apology and without appeal.

GEORGE RANDOLPH CHESTER.

Contents

Page

I. The Sordid Side, - n

II. Apprenticeship, - 16

III. Mental Equipment, .... 24.

IV. Creativeness, ----- 26
V. Imagination, 32

VI. Observation, ----- 36

VII. Democracy, ------ 42

VIII. Sympathy, 46

IX. Humor, ------ 54

X. Industry, 57

XI. The Business Story, - - - - 60

XII. The Political Story, 64

XIII. The Detective Story, - 67

XIV. . Stories for Children, 70

XV. Stories About Children, - 77

XVI. Stories of Adventure, 79

7

Page

XVII. The Love Story, - 81

XVIII. The Historical Story, - - 88

XIX. Dialect Stories, - - - - 90

XX. Stories Not to Be Written, - 92

XXI. Construction, ----- 94

XXII. The Beginning, - - - - 98

XXIII. Development, - 112

XXIV. The Ending, - - - - 119
XXV. Description, 120

XXVI. General Observations, - - 122

XXVII. Condensation, - - - - 125

XXVIII. Length of Stories, 128

XXIX. Editing, 130

XXX. Preparing a Manuscript, - - 132

XXXI. Marketing, 138

THE ART OF WRITING

c

The Sordid Side

"f*\ ommercialism" is here considered first,
because it is the most flaunted of
all bugaboos in art. We have an
inherited notion that an "artist" must, of
necessity, starve and go in rags, be a poor
business man, and have a soul above money.
All nonsense! That silly fiction is a relic
of past barbarian ages, when no profes-
sion but that of warfare really paid, either
in honor or riches. To-day the successful
artists, in every line, are abundantly re-
warded, and only the unsuccessful ones,
those least gifted with genius, must strug-
gle with the wolf of poverty and whine
that this is a soulless age. The period has
happily passed when the literary worker's
fame and profits were collected only by his
heirs; instead, the writers of to-day are, as
a class, rather keen business people, not
necessarily dissipated or improvident, and

ii

prosperous enough to be self-respecting.
Because you hope to be well paid for the
creations of your fancy, do not, for one
moment, fear that your finer sensibilities
are to be destroyed. Instead, equip your-
self for an artistic career, whether you in-
tend to seek your expression through brush
or chisel or pen, with the same care you
would prepare for a commercial life, de-
mand your just pay as boldly and receive it
with as much self-esteem. Merely be sen-
sible !

I speak of this so emphatically because I
wish to combat, in the very outset, certain
entirely false ideals that are quite likely to
find lodgment in the minds of beginners. I
doubt if there has ever been a time when the
cry of commercialism was not raised anent
matters of art, or when, on the other hand,
artists did not prefer a hot porterhouse steak
to a cold marble monument. It has come
to be pretty generally acknowledged in these
modern days that we shall be an extremely
long time dead, and the full realization of
this deep truth has the tendency to make
one wish to bedeck this all-too-brief life of

12

ours with as many gay garlands as possible.
In consequence the writers of this Gatling-
gun age look upon their thoughts as truly
golden, and pen them not so much for pos-
terity as prosperity; nor are the thoughts
any the less brilliant for their metallic sheen.
It is all the matter of incentive, in which Art
with a big "A" must say "brother" to As-
sets with a big "A;" and both are improved
by the association. An empty stomach is
not absolutely necessary to the development
of a large soul.

Remember, too, that pose and perform-
ance do not go well together. The gentle-
men of long hair and Byronic cravats who
call themselves Bohemians, and who spend
their guzzling time with kindred spirits in
the discussion of literature and art and mu-
sic, never write real stories nor paint real
pictures nor compose real sonatas. Those
master students of the human soul whose
names we revere worked as industriously as
shinglers, and did not know that they were
producing literature when they wrote it.
Moreover, throughout all the time these
then commercial-minded men toiled they

i3

doubtless had a thought for the diminishing
flour barrel, and how the immortal work
they were then producing might help to re-
plenish it. In a word, art, as art, is never
self-conscious.

What does all this mean? That we shall
have no more sincere dramatic or literary
or musical or graphic or plastic art? By
no means. These things can not die any
jmore than the innate longing of the hu-
man soul for higher and better and nobler
things can die. Art will rise above all
sordid circumstances in every age. It will
find expression not alone in spite of, but
partly because of the conditions that ham-
per it. We need not distress ourselves
about art. It will take care of itself. We
can do little for it. It is as irrepressible as
the storms of heaven, and in night which
seems the blackest, flashes of its divine ra-
diance will gleam so vividly upon our skies
that they will dazzle the world. In the
meantime, between those glimpses of divine
glory, reminding us with startling vividness
that within us all there dwells a portion of
the Godhead, we will all of us continue to

14

face the elemental realities of life, food and
clothing and shelter and social position —
and these demand money. So keep your hair
short if you are men, and long if you are
women; talk "literature" but little, and work
at it much; earn money, and spend it.

IS

Apprenticeship

If you plan to earn a living by authorship,
you must first very thoroughly prepare
yourself to earn a living at something
else; for the business of writing, like any
other, requires a long and arduous appren-
ticeship, and while one learns one must live.
So prepare to work, and your temporary oc-
cupation, or successive occupations, will be
of great value in ripening that knowledge of
the world without which no one may hope
to successfully enter this field. Considered
merely as a school of experience, the calling
best fitted as a preparation for this partic-
ular career should require one habitually to
express thoughts and describe occurrences
in writing; it should habitually bring one
into contact with all phases of life ; it should
be of broad and varied interests and should
provide a steady income. The only occupa-
tion which seems to fit all these require-

16

ments is the newspaper profession, and its
value for this end is proved by the fact that
from the ranks of the newspaper writers
come more successful magazine contributors
than from any other class of workers.

The advantages of a newspaper training
are many and obvious. In the first place
the reporter writes much and rapidly, and
he sees in actual print what he has written,
an invaluable privilege, learning from day
to day to correct his own style by experi-
ence and comparison. He learns lucidness
and directness, for newspaper writing per-
mits of no unnecessary words. He acquires
the habit of reliability. When he is sent
upon an assignment he knows that he must
come back with the item and that he must
write it without a moments delay. He
loses the tendency to absurd posing, for his
associates have penetrated to the kernel of
things, have made it their business to de-
tect shams at a glance, and have the gift of
ridicule developed to an art. Above all, he
comes in contact with every sort of man and
woman, with every side of life, with all hu-
man pathos and comedy and tragedy. The

17

whole world, all its passions and its emo-
tions, its weaknesses and its strength, its
degradation and its nobility passes before
him in review as a part of his daily routine,
and if he has the proper mental equipment
his work supplies him not only with mate-
rial that he will use for years, but with a
trained faculty for appreciating that mate-
rial when he finds it.

To the newspaper life there are, it is true,
a few drawbacks. The haste with which
articles are written is likely to encourage
slip-shod English; one must work hard and
at all hours; the associations outside the of-
fice are not always of the best, and one must
be of sturdy moral fiber to resist the forma-
tion of habits which tend to make success
impossible; there is, last of all, the tempta-
tion to "drift" and to remain a reporter,
which, while an interesting occupation, has
but very little future in it. Still, weaklings
are not likely to attain to much eminence
anywhere, and every walk of life is beset
with temptations to be fought, and over-
come, temptations by the resistance of which
to gain strength.

18

Some one, with wisdom and justice, has
said that the newspaper calling is the finest
in the world to get into to get out of, mean-
ing thereby that it is an unsurpassed step-
ping-stone to many other better-paying lines
of endeavor; and, as a matter of fact, almost
any profession can show among the ranks
of its most successful men a large propor-
tion of ex-reporters. For the purpose of
the would-be story writer, however, a met-
ropolitan daily is not to be recommended,
especially in the beginning, for in the large
cities the work is too minutely specialized.
The so-called "country" press— meaning by
that the newspapers in cities of two hun-
dred thousand or less — is much better.
There even the "cub" reporter is given a
varying range of assignments which would
never fall to his lot in the very large cities.
He is likely to have his turn at the police
route, at the courts, the city hall, the busi-
ness district; he will have a chance to re-
port a political meeting, a society function,
a business consolidation, a divorce case, a
slum settlement, a collection of pictures, a
millinery opening, a "show." The result of

19

his gleanings and the irreverent manner in
which he "writes up" these various affairs
are likely to be somewhat unpalatable to so-
ciety, business, art, and the drama, but it is
all excellent training for the "cub," and con-
tributes vastly to the range of his palette
of colors. He attains an absolute and in-
valuable sureness of gauging human motive,
and after some four or five years of work
along these lines, if he cares to go to a
larger city he is almost certain of securing
employment which will still further extend
his range. The ideal preparation for story
writing would be to tour the country in the
capacity of a finished reporter, working in
many cities — and to avoid, then, the impulse
to become merely a polite tramp.

One thing must be borne in mind: that
newspaper men work very hard when they
work, and when through they are likely to
play just as energetically. The toiler in
this line who expects to write a better-pay-
ing grade of material than that resulting in
his daily column or so must practice at it
constantly, must give up a portion of his
leisure to more serious literary effort, and

20

must try incessantly, from the time he starts,
to write magazine stories. If a reporter will
begin by religiously devoting one solid hour
each day to this attempt, never faltering,
never wavering, keeping the end steadfastly
in mind, for years if need be, in spite of all
discouragements, he is bound to succeed if
the gift of story- writing is in him; and there
is no other way! It seems much to ask, but
it is no greater price than is demanded for
eminent success in any other line.

There are other apprenticeships which
have proved valuable, other walks of life
which have produced their quota of story-
tellers. One modern success was a school
teacher on the East Side in New York. The
human interest in her stories was so pro-
found that people of every degree under-
stood and appreciated them. So long as she
wrote of her actual environment her success
was unbounded. When she attempted to
wander off into realms with which she was
not so familiar, her stories were but medi-
ocre. Had she had a wider experience of
life, it is not only possible but highly prob-
able that she could have treated of univer-

21

sal conditions and have produced what yet
remains to be written — the great American
novel.

Another successful writer was an assist-
ant district attorney, a club man in private
life, and officially in daily contact with crim-
inals of all degrees. He combined these
two phases of life with great deftness, and
wrote stories along both lines, separately
and in combination, which have earned him
a distinct place in the magazine field and
renders him an assured income of very com-
fortable proportions.

Writers of many other previous occupa-
tions have been more or less successful, but
in all of them the fundamental principle was
the same. Their positions were such that
before they wrote successfully they had
come in contact with a limitless number of
people, and so intimately that they were
able to study them in close comparison. It
is not possible for all to be newspaper re-
porters, nor school teachers, nor district at-
torneys, but whatever pursuit in which one
is placed, by determination or by circum-

22

stances, where there are opportunities for
study of varied humanity there are possi-
bilities to gain an understanding of the hu-
man soul, and that is the first and the great-
est requisite of the story-writer.

23

Mental Equipment

When the apprentice is finally
able to take up authorship as
a serious career, he will not
call his output "literature" any more than
a veteran reporter calls himself a "jour-
nalist." The ejphemeral writing of no pe-
riod has a right to call itself by any high-
sounding title. Literature is hoary-headed,
and some of it, it must be confessed, is even
senile and decrepit. It attains the dignity
of its title only with age, with the passing
of time which proves its right to continued
existence by its having continued to exist.
However, the more or less involved writing
of the past is to be valued no particle above
the crisp and lucid writing of the present.
The latter needs only to be winnowed, and
out cf the mass that is now being produced
there is no doubt that the usual proportion

24

will be found of permanent value. It is only
that our nearness to it interferes with the
perspective.

You yourself may give your name to this
coming epoch of American literature; but
you will not choose authorship as a profes-
sion; authorship will choose you. If you
have the necessary qualifications they will
not let you rest; and this brings us to the
matter of equipment.

Leaving aside the purely mechanical re-
quirements of a good command of English,
which must of course be had if you expect
to enter this field, you must have these seven
gifts: Creativeness, imagination, observa-
tion, democracy, sympathy, humor, and in-
dustry.

25

Creativeness

If one has not the same instinct which
would urge him to become an inventor, a
composer, an explorer, a pioneer in any
walk of life, he will succeed only in becoming
a copyist, and a copyist earns but a copyist's
pay. A story, to be interesting, must be full
of the same inventive faculty which would
go to the fashioning of a wireless motor, or
any other triumph of constructive ingenuity.
The newspapers frequently contain true
stories which are alive with dramatic inter-
est, and many which would at first glance
seem but to need polishing to reveal them-
selves as gems of fiction, and indeed, of many
of these stories it is often said that they are
"as good as a romance." This is seldom,
if ever, entirely true. On examination these
interesting occurrences will be found to be
lacking in some vital element, and if turned

26

directly into fiction they would seem but
very tame.

The most dramatic of real life happen-
ings are to be looked upon as but raw ma-
terial. Their great fault lies in the fact that
they are abnormal, else they would not be
considered as news; and it is not the abnor-
mal which proves of the greatest worth in
fiction. To be able to construct the nor-
mal, or rather to deal with the abnormal so
that it shall seem to be normal, or shall il-
lustrate the normal by emphasizing its di-
vergences, is the true creative art in story-
telling. To make people say, when they
have read some clever characterization,
"Why, I know people exactly like that," is N
to have achieved a triumph, and yet, to ac-
complish this requires a high form of cre-
ativeness.

"To hold, as 't were, the mirror up to
nature" is quite as much the province of fic-
tion as it is of the drama. To offer this re-
flection is, too, the ideal of the painter and
the sculptor; yet, when the finished product
of any of these arts is examined it will be
found that the mirror is a deceptive one in

27

that, while seeming to be accurate, it re-
flects nothing with absolute fidelity. Upon
the stage all emotions are exaggerated, alL
action is accelerated, all motives are inten-
sified, all characters are deliberately over-
drawn, conversations are condensed and ab-
breviated so that they come directly to the
point that must be made ; yet with all these
distortions, or, to speak more truly, by
A means of them, the effect of reality is pro-
duced. The most brilliant conversation of
real life, if transferred verbatim to the stage,
would become a dreary and a tedious thing
because of the lack of concentration and
crisp directness.

The artist who paints a picture of an
ideally beautiful woman spends much time
in the search of a model who will exactly
meet his requirements, and yet when he
finds her he does not paint a portrait of her.
He corrects the inevitable defect. He paints
a perfect nose, perhaps, upon an otherwise
imperfect countenance. Perhaps in forming
his ideal figure he paints the head of one
woman, the bust of another, the arms and
limbs of still another. The sculptor pro-

28

ceeds in exactly like fashion. Nothing is
perfect. It remains for the artist to create
perfection, and he achieves this ideal in ex-
act proportion to his skill and to the perfect-
ness of his conception. So, while the writer
of fiction must invariably go to real life for
his models, he must never attempt to make
them mere portraits. He must supply what
they lack, and in this his creativeness must
come into play.

This applies not only to character-draw-
ing and description, but to plot and inci-
dent as well. Out of an approximate half
dozen characters and half dozen scenic back-
grounds and half dozen incidents the writer
must create an entire new world, and yet
one illustrative of the world we all know.
His characters, if he has wrought wisely and
well, will be found, on close analysis, to be
like no living people whom any one has ever
met, and yet the most of them must seem
like people whom we all have known. Only
the central actor or actors in your drama
should be unusual, and not always even
these. The incidents will be found, on de-
liberate study, to occur with an opportune-

29

{must seem to be occurring most naturally*
jiess never met with in life, and yet they
This is the true creative power, and without
it no writer can succeed.

As an exercise, try to set down, accu-
rately and briefly, confining yourself to a
hundred words each, what you think you
know of the characters of ten of your neigh-
bors or acquaintances. When you have
done this, go over each commentary care-
fully and with calm, deliberate judgment.
You will find that, unconsciously, you have
exaggerated out of its true proportion some
characteristic of each person, and have omit-
ted to give due prominence to certain off-
setting characteristics. Try as you may to
be fair, you will find that your sense of jus-
tice has been outweighed by your personal
prejudices, even at the time when you were
trying to be most judicial. Aiding your
prejudices, your creative faculty has already
been at work. This is one of the psycho-
logical reasons why "gossip" is seldom, if
ever, true.

Revise these brief character-drawings
rigidly, and compel yourself to be absolutely

30

just. You will find that your characters in
the second writing are not nearly so pic-
turesque or interesting as in the first, where
your creative faculty had unconsciously
heightened their coloring.

Now write the ten character drawings a
third time, allowing your creative faculty
full play, and build up the characters as
they would be useful to you in fiction, exag-
gerating them all you like but still com-
pressing your estimations into the hundred-
word limit. You will find now, if your
work has been well done, that your people
have become more real to you than the per-
sons from whom they* were drawn. They
are warmer, more insistent of life and mo-
tive. Building upon -necessarily imperfect
types, you have created personages entirely
typical, in place of partly so, of their
leading characteristics. This illustration,
though perhaps a lame enough one, explains
what I have been trying to tell of the dif-
ference between cold fact and colorful fic-
tion, between imperfect realism and more
perfect idealism, between copyism and cre-
ativeness.

3i

Imagination

Imagination goes hand in hand with the
creative faculty. It not only builds up
in advance the ideal which the creator
tries to attain, but it furnishes the accessory
detail which places that ideal in its logical
environment. It supplies the waving trees
and the green grass and all the scenic back-
ground against which the tragedies and
comedies of your mimic life are enacted. It
is by imagination's magic aid that the men
and women of fiction seem to truly and ac-
tually live and move and have their being
in the minds of their creators.

It is probably a very safe venture to state
that every successful writer sees his char-
acters as vividly as if they were in the flesh.
They walk abroad, and the sun shines on
them; the heat of midday warms them and
the breezes of night chill them; they re-
spond to every phase of emotion; their

32

hearts beat under the thrill of love; their
blood surges with hate; their eyes dim with
tears. They are real, virile, human beings,
and, having fixed in his mind the motif of
his plot, having devised his situations, and
having brought into created being the peo-
ple who are to work out his comedy or his
tragedy, the writer gifted with this wonder-
ful faculty of imagination has but to keep
the eye of his mind steadfastly upon his
characters and watch them work out their
story for him. He only needs to set down
what they do and say.

Try a simple test of this. Place in your
field of mental vision a man and a woman.
Let the woman be, say, brunette and viva-
cious, the man tall and stern. They are
standing amid bleak trees. The cold twi-
light is coming on. There are little flakes
of snow in the air. The man suddenly
stoops and picks up something from among
the dry leaves at his feet. The woman
as suddenly springs for it and tries to
take it away from him. Are they laugh-
ing when they do this, or are they in des-
perate earnestness? Look at them and see,

33

What is the object over which they are
wrestling? It it a tell-tale letter, a docu-
ment of importance, or perhaps a kerchief
with a strange initial embroidered in the
corner? It is a little too dark to see from
a distance what the object may be, but there
is just a glint of white.

With these two characters and this situ-
ation in your mental vision, keep within
sight of the man and the woman, and see
what they do. Construct your own story.
Go gack and create a series of incidents
which might have led up to this situation.
Go forward and create the climax to which
this leads, but always keep the imaginative
vision of the two, as if in the actual flesh
and blood, in your mind. / There is a house
near by. You can see a gleam of light
through the half-denuded branches of the
trees. Who is in that house? Is it the
man's wife or the woman's husband? Is it
the man's father and mother or the girl's?
Or are these two man and wife, and are
children there? Out of your knowledge of
probable human events you may select a
thousand hypotheses to form a background

34

and an explanation and a denouement for
this man and this woman among the trees
in the chill twilight struggling for the pos-
session of something that glints white in
their hands; but if, while you pursue the
contributory facts, you lose clear mental
vision of the actual features and bodies of
the man or the woman, of the salient points
of their scenic environment, your imagina-
tion is at fault and you can not write inter-
estingly. Mere creativeness without imag-
ination is the cause of the dry-as-dust sto-
ries you read/\ You must have both, and
they must work in absolute harmony, nei-
ther one operating to the detriment of the
other.

35

Observation

Tis is the faculty upon which both
creation and imagination are built.
After all, we have finite minds, and
man only creates after known forms; he
only imagines upon material foundations.
Our most brilliant castles in the air are but
more delicate variants of familiar structures
of brick and stone ; the most expert builders
of air-castles, then, are those who have most
closely observed and mentally indexed to
minute detail our mundane castles.

There is no end to the store of informa-
tion, scarcely obtainable from reference-
books, which the observing mind will and
must acquire. What wild flowers and what
garden flowers bloom in certain months?
What trees are indigenous to certain local-
ities, and what are their characteristics of
sprouting their leaves and developing them
and shedding them; of blossoming and bud-

36

ding and bearing fruit? Have you noticed
how the white under sides of leaves, while
fluttering up in a breeze, give quite a differ-
ent shade of green to a tree? Have you ob-
served the differing apparent color of still
or running water at differing times of the
day, at differing times of the year, under
differing atmospheric conditions? How
many common insects can you recall and
describe? What effect has a frown upon
the other features of a man's countenance?
How many sorts of sunsets, as infinite in
their variety as the shapes of clouds can
you at this moment mentally catalogue and
briefly describe? Have you ever noticed the
peculiar heave of the body given by a man
straightening up under a hod of brick, or
the unconscious rhymthic pauses, for rest
of the muscles, indulged by a man mixing
mortar?

At this moment, as an exercise, try to de-
scribe the facial expressions of ten men, all
between the ages of thirty-five and forty, all
differing, and yet none abnormal. Give to
each some characteristic mannerism or ges-
ture, due to nervousness or habit. Try to

37

A

write the descriptions of these men, con-
fining yourself to fifty words for each one,
yet allowing your descriptions to be full
enough to convey a satisfying mental pic-
ture. Let us stand these ten men up in a
row and see what they look like :

"Number one is short and fat, with wide
lips and wide teeth and a wide nose. His
round cheeks are pink like a young boy's,
and his whole expression, except for the
shrewd lines about his eyes, is one of almost
cherubic infancy; yet every once in a while
he winks almost imperceptibly with his right
eye to emphasize some minor point in his
conversation. He is very self-important, is
number one, and jolly, too, but nevertheless
crafty."

Let us count this. Seventy-nine words.
Too many by twenty-nine. This, however,
is the first writing, just as it occurred to us.
Now we must edit it and reduce our num-
ber of words to the given figure without sac-
rificing the picture. Let us try. Here is the
second attempt:

"Number one, self-important and appar-
ently jolly, is short and fat, with wide lips

38

and wide teeth and wide nose. His round,
pink cheeks make him seem of almost che-
rubic infancy, but shrewd, crafty lines hem
his eyes, and occasional sly winks flicker
from the right one while he talks."

So much for Number one. Right after
or immediately preceding his description, he
ought to say something brief and pointed
which will further bring out his character,
and every time he is brought anew into your
story, brief reference should be made, as he
speaks, to his receptive cherubic appearance
or his craftiness or his wink, thus keeping
his picture fresh in the mind of your reader.

Now, without losing sight of this guile-
ful gentleman, let us take the next one in
line:

"Number two has a mustache cut off in a
stiff line above his upper lip, and it seems to
bother him a great deal, for his nervous
hand is constantly straying to it, trying to
put the invisible and long-since-clipped ends
into his mouth. For the rest, he is lean and
cadaverous, with a narrow forehead and
shifting gray eyes and stiff, wiry hair, and
he has an air of being constantly upon the

39

alert lest some one might tap him suddenly
upon the shoulder and tell him that he is
arrested."

Ninety-four words. We have been very
extravagant in our analysis of this interest-
ing character. We must cut down his de-
scription, however, to almost one-half, and
still retain the same strength of portraiture
and character-drawing; for, observe this, no
portrait description, unless it conveys with
it an idea of character, is worth the setting
to paper.

This condensation is a much more diffi-
cult task than the other, but it must be done.
Here is the result :

"Lean and cavaderous number two has a
narrow forehead, shifting gray eyes, and
stiff, wiry hair. His hand strays nervously
to his straight-clipped mustache, trying to
put into his mouth the missing ends, and he
seems constantly alert lest a sudden tap
upon the shoulder might mean his arrest."

Merely by way of illustration two of these
ten characters have been described. Por-
tray the other eight yourself, still retaining
clearly the mental pictures of all the ones

40

previously brought into existence, standing
in their row, more or less impatiently, ac-
cording to their natures, and you will find
to just what degree your powers of obser-
vation have been unconsciously at work.
If you can not go further than four more
distinctly drawn characters, cultivate your
observation. Study the faces of people
whom you meet. Watch their actions. It
should be said, however, that a deliberately
cultivated faculty of observation will never
completely take the place of a natural one,
one which, arising through a universal in-
terest in all objects and in all surroundings
of life, has taken unconscious note of all its
minute and vital details. The importance
of this faculty can scarcely be overestimated,
as you will discover to your later humilia-
tion if you set down details without know-
ing them to be entirely accurate. You
would make yourself very foolish, for in-
stance, to have flies or mosquitoes annoy a
character in your story at some mountain
resort, for at very easily accessible heights,
quite delightful to human beings, flies and
mosquitoes can not exist.

4i

Democracy

Democracy is essential, but it must be
instinctive, not forced or self-con-
scious. You must talk with both
bank presidents and ditch diggers, as you
have opportunity, with the same personal
interest, an interest which arises not from
mere curiosity nor even from definite pur-
pose, but from your innate brotherhood,
which makes these and all grades between
and beyond but men, and human, and
closely akin to your own clay. If you can
do this without priggish inner aloofness,
without toadyism on the one hand, or, upon
the other, without the condescension which
you fondly but futilely believe that you can
conceal, you will become intensely inter-
ested in the struggles, the failures, the ambi-
tions, and the triumphs of both, and you will
gain the sometimes humiliating but always
wholesome lesson that there is but very lit-

42

tie difference in any of us, except as to the
merest of externals. Strip the roughened
hide from your ditch digger and the mas-
saged and velvety skin from your banker,
take from the one his probable crudities of
language, and from the other his more or
less affected niceties of speech, and you will
find their code of ethics much alike, their
humanity exactly the same. They have the
same capacity for love and hate, the same
self-struggles, the same belief in their own
preponderance of good above evil.

It must be your task to have as much as-
sociation with as many different sorts of
men as possible, to strip from them this
outer husk of use and habit, heredity, train-
ing, and environment, and lay bare the hid-
den man. Find this first, then you can re-
store the shell and study with intelligence
divergent modes of thought and habits of
life, and the varying expressions of these
that are made necessary by different sur-
roundings and opportunity. After all, you
are searching for the undying mysteries
of immortal humanhood, a recognition of
which must be at the root, if not at the sur-

43

face, of every worth-while story, whether it
be comedy or tragedy; and you are just as
likely to find your soul problem in a squalid
tenement room as in a Fifth Avenue man-
sion, or just as likely again, avoiding these
two extremes, to find it in some pleasant
home of the moderately well-to-do, or in
some cottage of that large class which,
though without hope of riches, has fought
away the threat of poverty.

A writer must be of no caste or class. He
must be of all castes and all classes, for the
problem of life is infinitely larger than en-
vironment or custom, or accidents of birth
or breeding or wealth. Remember that the
people about you, as distinctive and as indi-
vidual as they may be, are, after all, as
viewed in their true perspective with crea-
tion, ephemeral creatures of no consequence,
who live but for a day and flutter their idle
lives away until they die in the chill of the
evening by uncounted thousands, without
having left any impress whatever upon the
earth that bore them, or upon its vital af-
fairs. A hundred years from now perhaps
not one out of all the people you know will

44

be remembered; but humanity itself, with
which, on the final analysis, you deal, is ever-
lasting. If you are most fortunate you may
meet men of large affairs, but even among
these there are very few whose deeds, whose
graves, whose very names will not be quickly
forgotten, and even these few are but ordi-
nary clay. Beneath your story, then, of
their trifling emotions and the puny epi-
sodes in which they figure, there must be
something universal, something which ap-
plies, just as well in one age as in another,
to all humanity in its larger relation to the
spirit of all things. It is not always pos-
sible to segregate this kernel of universal
humanity, to put your finger upon it, to say
that this deep, underlying truth is the thing
you wished to prove or to illustrate; but
you may be quite sure that if your story
awakens a quick response in the minds and
hearts of the majority of your readers, you
have, perhaps by blind instinct, woven a
grain of this intangible leaven into your
work.

45

Sympathy

Sympathy must be a part of your de-
mocracy, and a large part. You
must try, in the attempt to under-
stand yourself, to obtain an understanding
of every other man. You must try to know
his mental outlook; to find out what he
thinks and why he thinks it. You must
bring yourself to appreciate precisely why
the horse-thief stole the horse, how he jus-
tified himself in that act, and sympathize
with him in so far as to see why, had you
been in his place, with his heredity, train-
ing, environment, and mode of thought,
you, too, would have stolen the horse and
felt that you had a legitimate excuse.

You can not paint the woes of others un-
less you yourself can, by comprehension at
least, suffer that woe. Actual suffering
would bring you nearer to an understand-

46

ing of it, perhaps, but it might also blunt
your other faculties of creation, imagina-
tion, and observation, and blunt, too, your
desire to observe, to imagine, and to create;
but so long as you are thoroughly conscious
of the capacity to suffer, so long as there lie
in you the conscious elements of woe and
of sorrow, you can project yourself into that
frame of emotion long enough and clearly
enough to analyze it, and to set down its
salient features. And that capacity can
come about only through sympathy.

Shut yourself in for a moment. You are
now a man of virile middle age who have
fought your way from obscurity to inde-
pendence. You have been self-centered in
business. You are married. Your wife, still
retaining, in your eyes, her youth and
beauty, has been your trusted helpmate
through all these years. You have loved her
and have placed implicit confidence in her.
At the very point when you are able to set
aside your more weighty business problems
and to sit back with a sigh of content and
say, "I have won, and I can now begin to
enjoy life," you have come home to find that

47

your wife, tiring of the long struggle and
of what she deems inattention on your part,
has eloped with a man you had considered
to be your best friend.

You find that the telephone is cut off.
You have inadvertently locked yourself in.
There is no way to get out until morning.
You are entirely alone in that empty house
with all its haunting memories, and with
no human soul in whom you may confide.
You must pass the long night there with
no company but your own tumult of
thoughts. Outside there is nothing but
darkness.

Now consider. Lose your own self com-
pletely. Actually be this man. What are
your emotions through that night? What
floods of rage and murderous fury surge
through you? What softening memories
come to torment you ? What bewilderments
overwhelm you as you try to understand
how this terrible thing could be? What
self-reproaches come to you?

There occurs, at some time during that
night, a crisis, during which your emotions
crystallize into a definite purpose; and then

48

in what desperate mood do you meet the
dawn?

We will now say -that you have passed
through this ordeal. What you have suffered
would fill pages, yet no one would care to
read all that you could write about your men-
tal and moral and physical struggle. What
you must do is to pick out the salient features
of that struggle; to give not the detailed
steps but the impression of that night of
agony in as few words as possible, so that
the reader, in passing with you through that
period of torture, will gain a complete feel'
ing of your suffering and know just how it
was, as if he had himself suffered. That ap-
peal to his sympathy through your own is
a higher art than the detailed analysis of
every step in this mental and moral and
physical cataclysm. The former uses of the
coldly scientific analysis and the present use
of the impressionist method in producing
an emotional effect upon the reader, is one
of the chief divergences between the old
school of fiction writing and the modern
school, and the modern school is vastly bet-
ter.

49

For a test, write your hypothetical expe-
riences of that night as fully as you like,
then cut it down exactly one-half. Cut the
residue down another half, still trying to
produce the effect of a night of agony, and
without sacrificing any phase of the episode
of your mental attitude during it; then see
how much better and more effective is the
quarter-length than the full-length compo-
sition.

Take other situations which demand sym-
pathy, and see how you can handle them.

You are a young woman, attractive, re-
fined, pure, intelligent, spirited. You have
been raised, if not in luxury, at least in com-
fort. You are the oldest child. Your father
dies, leaving behind him nothing but debts.
Everything is sold, and you, with your
mother and two younger sisters, go away
from the loathed place where suddenly you
find that you have no friends. The struggle
for life begins. Your mother is ill, the two
sisters are too young, and perhaps too deli-
cate, to work. You try to find employment,
and in the first place into which you go you
are met with a coarse insult to your youth

50

and your attractiveness and your woman-
hood. Still you can not give up the strug-
gle. Your needs force you. There is very
little at home to eat. There is rent to be
met. Everything salable has been sold.
You have positively no recourse. You must
earn money. You meet with rebuff after
rebuff and with insult after insult; some-
times with worse — with kindness which acts
as a cloak to insult that bides its time and
opportunity. Put this soul and its torments
on paper, without melodrama and without
artificiality, if you can!

Again, you are a man of below the aver-
age in education, intelligence, breeding, op-
portunity, and environment. You have com-
mitted a crime, perhaps in the heat of pas-
sion, perhaps as a rash expedient. They are
hunting you. You are hiding in a dark cor-
ner in a cellar, half concealed by some rub-
bish. You hear footsteps coming down the
stairway. You are desperate. You are
cowering, with all your muscles tense, ready
for flight or fight. The gleam of a lantern
accompanies the steps, and the lantern
swings closer and closer to your corner.

5i

Besides the foremost man, who is carrying
the lantern, there are three others, all huge
men, your equals in physique, and they are
all armed. You have a revolver in your
hand as you wait. Your heart beats so vig-
orously that you fear it must be audible.
The lantern approaches quite closely, then
it turns, and the men who have been coming
straight toward you walk away to other
parts of the dim cellar. They make the
rounds and return to the bottom of the steps.
They are about to go up, when the leader
with the lantern turns back, comes closely
a little part of the way again toward your
corner, but finally gives up the search and
goes upstairs with the other men.

Of course you can not approve of that
wretch, even as he cowers there in the cellar,
with his revolver gripped in his hand so
hard that it leaves the impress of its every
marking in his palm, but you must sympa-
thize with him. Be that man in your sym-
pathy and write his emotions, then condense
them to a mere paragraph so that you can
make your reader, who also can not possibly

52

approve of him, feel with him that same hu-
man sympathy.

Here have been given three tests of this
quality in yourself. Write these three, then
devise seven more situations calling for sym-
pathetic treatment, and condense them until
you have conveyed that impression of sym-
pathetic emotion in the briefest and most
effective manner of which you are capable.

S3

Humor

A 11 these qualities, creativeness, observa-
f*\ tion, imagination, democracy, sym-

^ pathy, must be tempered by humor.
A sense of humor is the foundation of all \
optimism. A sense of humor is the universal
solvent of human emotion. A sense of hu-
mor is the touch-stone which renders the
most puzzling of human problems under-
standable; but it is also a thing which is
born and can never be acquired. If you
have not the gift you might just as well
never try to obtain it. If you have it count
yourself blest, but be careful of its use.
You can make yourself most absurd with a
lack of discretion in this particular.

In more serious work the value of humor
is in the making of contrast.

Two men in a room confront each other.
One has a revolver in his hand, the other
is entirely at his mercy.

54

"Quickly !" says the man with the re-
volver. "Walk across to that window and
wave your handkerchief, or I shall fire !"

"Fire, then," says the younger and
slighter of the two.

It is a tense moment. They glare into
each other's eyes, and in neither man is
there any sign of weakening. Then sud-
denly a hoarse voice at the window croaks:

"Fire ! Fire ! O, fireman, save my child !"

It is a green parrot hanging in a cage.
In spite of the grave matter at issue be-
tween them smiles flit across the faces of
both men. The absurd incongruity of the
interruption appeals to the sense of humor
in each one, and for a moment the tension
is relaxed. The older and darker man is
the first to strive to regain it. He tries to
bend his previous inflexible sternness of gaze
upon his opponent, but the chattering bird,
once started, keeps up its irrelevant scream-
ing, and the tension definitely breaks.

"Come," appeals the younger man, after
the parrot has quieted down; "let us sit
here and look at this thing from another
angle."

55

From that point on the situation may
have a dozen different terminations, a score
of them, a hundred; but the point has passed
where any interjected remark by the par-
rot can have a humorous significance. The
next one, no matter how irrelevant, would
have a tragic significance in the story. Im-
agine the effect if the next absurd phrase
should be croaked while the younger man
lay dead ! Part of the absurdity of the orig-
inal interruption came in its unexpectedness,
and about humor there is nearly always that
quality. Its largest value in your own work
will come about through its unexpected oc-
currence to you as you proceed with your
construction. Very few good humorous sit-
uations are deliberately built. They just
happen. As for straight humorous writing,
there is no need to analyze it or even dis-
cuss it here. Born humorists need no in-
struction, and the other kind need not try.

56

Industry

I have placed this last for emphasis — the
ability to work and keep on working,
even after you think that you have
passed the limit of endurance. There is no
permanent success to be achieved in any
line without work, and particularly is this
true of authorship. To begin with, assum-
ing always that you are to make your own
way from the start — and every worth-while i
career is so sustained — you will have some
bread-winning occupation which will leave
you tired when your drudging hours are
over. Social attractions will take up some
of your spare time, and so, right in the
very beginning, what literary labor you do
will be performed in hours that are stolen
from rest and recreation and sleep. This
reason alone keeps in eighteen-dollar-a-

57

week grooves, for a lifetime, many men
eminently fitted for success in writing. The
disheartening part is that your first efforts
will doubtless be unsuccessful; that night
after night and morning after morning must
be given up for a year, for two years, for
three years, possibly, to toil that seems
fruitless. This does not sound so much of
a hardship until you try it; until the days
of discouragement come; until all your ef-
forts, applauded by your friends, are scorned
by the only critics worth while — those who
would actually buy your material and pay
real money for it. The only course to take
in such cases is to work! When discour-
agement comes, work! When you are tired
out, and sick even of your ambition, work!
When the temptation comes to slip back
into the rut, to drift along with the lazy
tide, rouse yourself and work! I do not
very much believe in the genius of inspira
tion. I thoroughly believe in an adaptabil-
ity and a natural liking for a pursuit, and
then in work, work, work! Not work by
fits of sudden enthusiasm, but steady, all-
the-year-round work! Nothing but work!

58

\

And that is the royal path to success. Other
people have said this so often and in so
many ways that it seems trite and stale,
but I mean it! I have passed through
the grind, and I know. C Lay aside idle
planning and dreaming, and WORK!;

59

The Business Story

Unless you are strong enough to cre-
ate the fashions, follow them, for
stories change fashion from year
to year as markedly as do clothes. As
you will see, if you keep understandingly
in touch with the current magazines, the
story which to-day has precedence over all
others in popular demand is the business
story. The same thrill which used to
characterize stories of adventure, the same
intensity, the same struggle to win now ap-
pears just as effectively and picturesquely
in depicting the commercial and political
battles of this financial age. If you know
anything worth telling about the conduct
of any business, if you have any fertility
in plot and facility in character-drawing,
you may combine those requisites in a story
which will have a better chance of accept-
ance than any tearful tale of Philip and

60

his Chloe. The strategies of finance, high
and low, frenzied and trapped; the romance
of millions, and how they were made or
stolen; the Titanic battles of the kings of
commerce; the ambitions and struggles and
final triumphs of the butcher, the baker, and
candlestick-maker; the daily affairs of the
"tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary,
plow-boy, thief," these and their service in
the cause of the Great God Success are the
things which interest the live public of to-
day.

To write a business story you must know
intimately of business detail. A knowledge
of the mere outward detail is scarcely
enough. You must know not only the mi-
nute method of procedure in the particular
line of business which you are handling, but
you must know the spirit and mental atti-
tude of the men who conduct that business,
for in no class of story can you make a more
absurd failure than in this, if you are not
thoroughly posted. To write a brokerage
story and have brokers say that you must
have worked in a broker's office, to write a
mercantile story and have merchants say

61

you must have worked in a store, to write
manufacturing stories and have manufac-
turers say that you must have worked in a
factory, with knowledge of the inside ma-
nipulative conditions of each of these, is to
be successful. Anything else spells failure.
Experience is necessary in this line. You
can not invent business conditions, business
knowledge, or business detail, and without
much contact with business men, in their
business life, you are quite likely to misun-
derstand their attitude and action in busi-
ness deals. Having the experience, this is
the most prolific field of all for the modern
writer, for it covers the subject which the
large mass of the American public has most
at heart. Even women to-day read business
stories with avidity.

The materials lie everywhere. The story
of how Hiram Jones bought Ezra Tidball's
successful Dry Goods and Notions Empo-
rium at Hick's Mills Cross Roads and made
a failure of it, or took over the unsuccess-
ful Emporium and made a success of it, or
"euchered" Ezra out of it, or was cleverly
foiled in the attempt, is likely to prove just

62

as good fiction material as the consolidation
of all the railroads in the world. In either
event there might be a more or less perfunc-
tory love-story interwoven, and there should
also be some problem involving business
honor. Despite the general impression to
the contrary, among people who talk merely
for conversation's sake, there is, throughout
the entire United States, a keen awakening
of business honor; and this notwithstand-
ing that business affairs have never been
so shrewdly conducted. The line between
business trickery and business cleverness,
however, is quite sharply drawn, and it is
at the crossing of this line that the most
dramatic business stories will be found.

63

The Political Story

Here again absolute knowledge must
be had, or your stories will be
both silly and absurd, and people
who are posted will know it. The news-
papers are full of political charge and
counter-charge, and they furnish a wealth
of material in the way of incident, most
of it exaggerated, but a great deal of it
containing much truth. Many of these in-
cidents are elaborate enough upon which
to build a thoroughly satisfactory plot, but
neither incident nor plot are sufficient, no
matter how complete, without an intimate
knowledge of the class of men concerned.
Both the reformer and the grafter are rich
material, but they must be understood,
and to understand them they must be
known. The reformer is easier to compre-
hend, for his leading motive coincides with

64

the code of ethics which we have all been
taught. He possesses a trace of fanaticism
which often renders him absurd, but when
he is free from this absurdity and possesses
ability he is a clean-cut, vigorous man of
great dramatic value. The grafter, on the
other hand, without an intimate acquaint-
ance with his motives, is well nigh incom-
prehensible. It must be remembered that
in most cases he justifies himself, to himself
at least, for all his acts; that he does not
imagine himself to be a moral leper; that
he has both actual and fancied virtues upon
which he prides himself very highly, and
that he stoutly contends even to himself, in
the final analysis, that he is an admirable
man.

It does not matter whether you agree
with him in this estimate or not. It is not
your province to editorialize in a story.
You must present the man as he is. If the
man's purposes and methods must be dis-
approved, so construct your story that the
reader will furnish the disapproval. Never
call your villain a villain. Present his vil-
lainous act or his villainous speech without

65

comment and without indignant coloring,
just as the act presumably happened or the
speech was presumably spoken, and do not
overdraw either one. Your audience will
very quickly decide his character if you have
drawn him correctly, and they will not thank
you for having left them no room for the ex-
ercise of their own intelligence. For the
same reason it is not wise to call your hero
noble upon every page, nor your humorous
character funny, nor your disagreeable
woman sour.

Material for political stories will be found
everywhere, from the rural district to the
city, from ward to national politics, and if
well drawn they are always interesting and
always salable. Experience, again it must
be insisted upon, is absolutely requisite,
however, in the handling of these stories,
and without that intimate knowledge they
had best be let severely alone.

66

The Detective Story

One enters the realms of fancy, now,
and more latitude for divergence
from truth is permitted here by
custom than in the two classes of stories
above named. It is quite likely that the
true detective story has not yet been writ-
ten. Nearly all of them which have found
vogue are most radical distortions, and ap-
peal to the reader not from their proba-
bility, but from their ingenuity. Sherlock
Holmes, to cite an instance, is a purely
imaginative creature, the like of whom has
never existed, and probably never will exist,
and he is as far from the truth as those di-
verting thieves, Raffles and Arsene Lupin.
Exaggerated character drawings, however,
are, by custom, allowable throughout in sto-
ries of this kind, and they are even recom-
mended as heightening the color.

These and all other mystery stories are

67

almost necessarily written backwards; that
is, the solution of the puzzling situation
must be known in advance by the writer, and
the developments which lead up to the solu-
tion carefully worked out, so that conceal-
ment is maintained until the very end. If
the writer begins with a mystery unsolvable
to himself, and constructs a story about this,
finally working out a solution, he is furnish-
ing the intelligence of his reader with the
same basis for deduction as himself, and his
denouement will be anticipated. On the
other hand, if the creation of the story is
started with the solution fixed firmly in
mind, it is possible to bafHe the reader from
beginning to end, while still holding his
piqued interest and attention, which is fully
as essential as endless ingenuity of plot.

There is an excellent market for this type
of story if it is cleverly written, and no very
deep knowledge of criminology seems re-
quisite, to judge from certain commercially
successful examples, although a mastery of
criminal court proceedings and police rou-
tine should be had. At least two women
have been quite facile in this line, but in the

68

work of both of them the lack of knowledge
of criminal character is conspicuous, and
makes their creations of necessity ephem-
eral. More accurate knowledge might
give them a more permanent value. Perma-
nent fame, however, is reserved for the
writer — and he will almost of necessity be a
man, since only a man can have a properly
intimate acquaintance with his types — who
will pen the story of actual modern detective
work, filled with brilliant character draw-
ings of criminals as they actually are and
detectives as they really exist, and with plot
and incident as they might with exact prob-
ability occur. These will be brutal stories
and sordid, but they will be full of fighting
and red blood and virility and thrilling situa-
tions and dramatic climaxes. There will not
be in them so much keen mental deduction
as there will be physical supremacy, and
once they have their vogue established, they
will command a high price. Truth always
does.

69

Stories for Children

There is nothing so difficult to write,
and which pays so little in mone-
tary returns, considering the amount
of labor and talent required, as stories
for children. The gift of writing them
acceptably is a very rare one, and people
are more often mistaken in their ability
in this line than in any other. It seems
a simple thing to do, but it is not. In
the first place, few people understand the
processes of a child's mind, and in the en-
deavor to write down to their comprehen-
sion insult their intelligence. So many
people forget, or never seem to have com-
prehended, that children, in mental fiber, in
observation, in comprehension, and in rea-
soning power, are precisely like their el-
ders, with the sole exception of lacking ex-
perience upon which to base their deduc-
tions. Most of the attempts to appeal to

70

the intelligence of children are utterly silly.
There is nothing truer than that men are
but children of a larger growth, but the con-
verse is equally true. A few writers have
realized this, and have appealed, soberly
and with splendid success, directly to the
child intelligence as if it were grown up,
being only careful to use an easy range of
vocabulary, ideas which can come within
the range of child experience, and plot and
incident which are free from the need of
maturity. Love, for instance, may be be-
tween the sexes, but must be absolutely
sexless.

An immoral lesson or an immoral deduc-
tion must, of course, never be possible, but
neither is it necessary to try, in every page,
to cram a moral preachment down the
throats of poor, badgered infants, who must
listen,, every day of their lives, to wearisome
sermons from some one or the other of
many misguided acquaintances. If you had
to endure, throughout every revolution of
the earth upon its axis, to have some three
or four people solemnly warn you to be
good, you would become tired, by and by,

7i

of being naturally good because you were
born that way and because your natural in-
stincts set in that direction, and be tempted,
merely out of self-assertiveness, to be bad.
It is quite possible to convey good moral
lessons without being so infernally obvious
about it. Happily the spasm is passing in
which it was considered immoral to tell
children fairy stories. Their imaginations
are fully as keen as ours, and need food just
as their bodies do, and it is most comfort-
ing to run across a tale now and then which
is meant merely to amuse them and to en-
gage their fancies. About once in a gener-
ation a Frank L. Baum arises to bless the
children, and is richly rewarded, but, like
the writer of humor, he is born, not made.
If you have inclinations in that direction,
you might try. You can never know
whether or not you have a gift until you put
it to the test.

The writing of stories for the very young
has, however, one very valuable feature for
all beginners. Several writers whom I know
had their earliest literary practice upon the
writing of children's stories, and were com-

72

pelled thereby to seek simplicity of lan-
guage. It becomes necessary to use as
many words of one syllable as possible,
never to use a three-syllable word where a
two-syllable word will do, and never to use
a word of more than three syllables at all.
It would seem at the first glance that this
would hamper expression. On the contrary,
it is a vast aid to it. Let us examine a
sample paragraph.

"At the close of day the man stood on the
top of the hill, a black blot against the red
rim of the sun. The cold wind of the night
blew upon him from out the icy north.
Looking down on the far-off city which he
had just left for all time, he hid his face in
his hands and sobbed."

You will find, upon glancing over these
sentences, which are taken from no story
whatever, but which might well serve as the
introduction to one, that out of sixty-two
words, all but six consist of one syllable,
while the six exceptions are extremely
simple words; yet I do not believe that any
more vivid picture could be constructed
with all the polysyllabled Latin derivatives

73

in the world. I would not counsel any one
to attempt to found his style upon Addison
or Steele or any other writer living or dead,
but I would counsel long and painstaking
practice in the art of writing in simple
words. You are compelled by this to di-
rectness of speech and clearness of idea.
You are bound to gain force by it. If you
have thoroughly grounded yourself in this
practice, you need the style of no other man
from which to copy. Afterwards you may
take liberties with your self-imposed restric-
tions ; may allow yourself as wide a choice as
you like, but always those fundamentals of
directness and clarity will be the basis of
your work, and you can not go far wrong.
For this reason I would commend the writ-
ing of stories for young children. If you
can secure the opportunity to edit or write
a child's page for some newspaper for a
year or two, take it at any price. Your gain
in simplicity of expression will be worth an
incalculable price to you in after years, if
you take up writing as a permanent profes-
sion.

As has been pointed out, this is not a
74

paying branch. Commercial reasons are be-
hind this. Most of the children's pages in
the newspapers are supplied by syndicates
which provide the entire pages, including
the illustrations, very cheaply, sometimes
for as low as three dollars a week, furnish-
ing the same material to a great many pa-
pers. They do not pay high prices to their
writers because there are so many of them,
girls and beginners who do not expect much
for their labor. There are but very few
children's magazines, and these are unable
to pay large prices because they find it im-
possible to secure much advertising for their
pages. Children are not buyers of merchan-
dise to any large extent, and the older peo-
ple, as a rule, see their advertisements in
other places.

So far we have discussed only stories for
the very young, but magazine and Sunday
newspaper stories for youths of from twelve
to eighteen do not offer a much better mar-
ket, the same reasons prevailing. Stories of
this type for book publication, however, are
more worth while from a monetary stand-
point, as witness the books of Henty, Louisa

75

M. Alcott, and others. Such books are usu-
ally written in series, and comprise, for boys,
tales of clean adventure in which the manly
qualities of courage and honesty have a
prominent part; and for girls, home or
school stories in which the counter-balanc-
ing feminine virtues have an equally impor-
tant place. In both of these the action must
be constant, for the minds of the young are
eager and restless as much so as their
bodies, and require constant change.

While very exceptional talent in this line
will reap a satisfactory commercial reward,
the same amount of effort and ability, if
spent upon general fiction, will pay much
better. It will not be for you to choose,
however. You will discover, eventually,
that you can write some things much bet-
ter than others. When you find that branch
of work, unless you are one gifted with a
universality of genius, stick to it and de-
velop it to your highest power, and at the
same time develop your market. Concen-
tration here, as in every other line of busi-
ness in the world, will achieve a most com-
fortable and satisfying success.

76

Stories About Children

Stories about children, for "grown-
ups" to read, fall into an entirely
different class from those above, and
for these stories, well written, there is al-
ways a most eager demand. Josephine
Dodge Daskam, George Madden Martin,
Myra Kelly, and others, have attained
both fame and competence in this line,
and the fundamental feature of their work
has been that it is true to all childhood.
They have penetrated and understood the
minds and hearts of children, not to ap-
peal to them, but to appeal to others who
know and understand. Almost any bright
child may form the basis of such portrai-
ture. It must be borne in mind, how-
ever, that here, as in all other classes of
fiction-writing, stories do not come to your
hand ready-made. They are imperfect, as
you find them in real life, and your observa-

77

tion and experience can only give you the
germ of the stories and the character-draw-
ing. The stories themselves must be devel-
oped from the material you find, and the
same rules which apply to other story con-
struction apply here. There must be a be-
ginning, a purpose, and a climax.

78

Stories of Adventure

This is a class of story which will
never die, and its range is as wide
as the globe itself. Even in the
meekest and the mildest of us there ex-
ists at least the rudiments of a desire to
wander forth into the unknown, to do
battle, and to conquer, and if we can not
do this in the tender flesh, we insist upon
doing it in the hardy imagination. Good,
stirring stories of adventure excite and
still satisfy the wanderlust of most of us.
No hard and fast rule can be laid down
for this class of story, for it is of end-
less variety. Wherever circumstance or en-
vironment may be devised that fearless
men may venture into danger and peerless
women may be rescued, there will be found
the materials, and truth may put the cover
upon her well and rest a while. Only be

79

careful that one thrill treads sharply upon
the heels of another, that your heroine be
as good as she is beautiful, your hero with-
out a trace of fear, and your villain remorse-
lessly blood-thirsty, and you may wander at
will in the realms of your fancy to devise
enough violent deeds for them to do. The
locale may be in a city, a village, or a forest;
on sea, in a mine, or in an airship; at the
equator or the north pole, in Japan or Africa
or America, in the past, the present, or the
future, or in all of these, bearing always in
mind, above everything, that you must have
swift and continuous action and high moral
purpose; for there is nothing cleaner in all
the realms of literary composition than the
morals of your slashing melodrama. To
that writer who can devise a new setting for
the old elements of adventure stories there
awaits laurels of gold which can be coined
into abundant dollars.

80

The Love-Story

In no line of fiction is the tremendous
change in public taste shown more
than in what is known as the straight
love-story. In the old type love was a
strange, abstract sort of creation with every
hint of sex carefully eliminated, though
it was the be all and end all of the
living world. Impossible men wooed im-
possible maidens through long chapters
devoted for the most part to poetic de-
scription. An entire page was given up to
describing the sunny day in June in which
the story opened, and the remaining pages
told how the birds flitted in the trees and
the butterflies hovered over the flowers;
how the breezes, straying from far-off mead-
ows and laden with the fragrance of new-
mown hay, stirred gently the locks of the
fair-haired maiden in the garden plucking

81

roses. End of first chapter. Chapter two
was devoted entirely to a description of the
fair-haired maiden; her lips, her eyes, her
alabaster brow, and every part of her vis-
ible perfections were carefully catalogued
and indexed until, at the close of the chap-
ter, He, astride a prancing charger, dis-
mounted at the gate. He was sometimes
rich and sometimes poor, but necessarily
honest. There was a rich and necessarily
dishonest man, considerably older and in-
variably of a dark complexion, who wanted
to marry her, and who was favored by her
parents. Need we say, dear reader, that
after much trial and tribulation and heart-
breaking sorrow and sickness-unto-death,
the rich but dishonest man was proved a
villain and she married Him ? Last of all,
after the story was all over, there was a de-
scription of the bridal garments and the
name of the hymn which was played as they
walked up the aisle of the church, in full
view, as they passed the window, of the vil-
lain's shining tombstone. About the only di-
vergence ever permissible in this class of
stories was in the names of the characters.

82

Plot, incident, and character-drawing were
almost identical.

The modern straight love-story scarcely
exists, but love is still with us, as potent as
it was when it first rolled forth from chaos,
and in a story its presence is nearly always
necessary. In most cases, however, it is
only elementary and incidental, being ad-
mitted as a leading motive, but giving way
in interest of detail to the absorbing action
which grows out of it or revolves about it.
Men are ready to do battle and to die for love
just as promptly as ever, if need be, but the
condition is recognized in its truer relation
to life. Nearly always the love-story of to-
day is written with a frank recognition,
though by no means always expressed, of
the sex relation. It is taken for granted
that two given persons are more in har-
mony with each other psychologically, phys-
iologically, mentally, and spiritually than
either of these same two persons would be
with any other person. In this attitude
there has been no change since civilization
recognized the right of a woman to mutual
choice, but, nevertheless, love as the lead-

83

ing incident of a story has been well nigh
discarded. It becomes the motive, mostly
A in the background, upon which all other in-
cidents are hinged and to which they refer.
The explanation is very simple, though the
principles have not changed. Men do not
neglect their business because they are in
love, but they succeed in it to prove to the
woman of their choice their prowess and
so to win her admiration, precisely as the
knights of old used to go out before break-
fast and kill an enemy or so, to lay the cap-
tured arms and accoutrement at the feet of
their ladies; only business does not seem so
romantic as righting, and it takes more space
and prominence to arouse interest.

The girl of the modern story is as differ-
ent from the girl of the early story as a
modern girl is different from the early girl,
or, in fact, as modern times are different
from early times. She is healthy of mind
and body. She is not innocent in the old-
time sense of being ignorant, and above all
she is independent, all facts which have been
so many death-blows to the old-time twad-
dler. The girl in the old-time love-story was

84

exaggerated from the models that the writer
saw around him, and carried to the Nth
degree of what he thought a clinging vine
ought to be like. Women read these stories
and sighed and wept over them, and what
influence they had upon heredity, heaven
only knows. Happily we have outgrown
them. The girls in the stories of to-day are
drawn, as are all other characters and inci-
dents, from actual life, idealized but slightly,
and they have infinitely more naturalness;
and charm and winsomeness.

This branch of the work is so persistently
dwelt upon here because, with the very
young and consequently with every amateur,
the love-story, as a rule, f ollows immediately
upon those early attempts at poetry in which
every line is very carefully begun with a
capital letter and in which the last word of
each second and fourth line is most painstak-
ingly rhymed. When we come to have a
dim perception that perhaps Tennyson,
through some intangible reason or other,
had a trifle the advantage of us, we turn to
prose, and what more natural than the tran-
sition to poetic prose? It is the springtime

85

of life with us, when birds twitter and flow-
ers bloom and morning skies blush red, and
all because love is in the world. Perhaps
those strangely stilted creatures who did
nothing all day long but fall in love and stay
in love from preface to finis, who talked love
and plotted love, dreamed love and thought
love, and all but ate and drank it through
the pages of the long since forgotten Godey's
Ladies' Magazine, owed their being to the
fact that American literature itself was then
quite young. To-day, in the dawning ma*
turity of Western letters, all is changed.
Once in a decade, perhaps, there is pub-
lished a strong and worth-while tale of love
which wades seas and scales mountains, but
for the most part this vast main-spring of
human motive and action is crowded into its
case with the other cogs and pinion wheels
that go to make up the general largeness of
life.

To tell the truth, editors do not particu-
larly care for love-stories, especially of the
variety that is likely to be turned out by the
young. They know, and writers who have
trod the thorny path which leads to suc-

86

cess know, that this sort of tale is the most
difficult of all to write, and that the happy
medium between the mawkish sentimental-
ity of puppy love and the perfectly frigid at-
titude of those who marry because two can
live cheaper than one, is most difficult to
obtain. It is better by far to leave love-
stories alone, unless one happens to have a
special gift for them. In that case no con-
trary advice will hurt, because the gifted one
will pay no attention to it, but "will follow
his natural bent, even as you and I."

The obvious stories, based upon the ev-
ery-day comedy and tragedy about you, with
love perhaps as a background motive, al-
low me to repeat, are better. Some day,
when maturity comes, when you can study
this great emotion and passion in its true
relations, when you have attained facility
as a writer, you may perhaps write the great
love-story, but until then practice upon
something you can comprehend.

87

The Historical Story

This is the sugar, or salt, or other
staple commodity, of the story-
telling and story-selling trade. It
is dear to our souls, it warms the cockles
of our hearts, this swash-buckling old friend
of ours. Occasionally the writers of his-
torical stories spend much time and re-
search to rehabilitate a by-gone period, to
reproduce it in all the finery and charm
that perspective lends it, and to make it
an accurate picture of the past, but with all
their labor it becomes, in fact, merely but
a background upon which to hang stirring
romance and adventure, and what was said
in relation to stories of adventure conse-
quently applies here. There is no question
that the historical setting gives to such sto-
ries the enhancement of color, but if at-
tempted they should be as near historically
accurate as patient research can make them.
A few mere "gadzooks" and "godswounds"

88

will not take the place of this care in mak-
ing anything like permanent success. For
the balance the same rule applies to the con-
struction of these stories as to the construc-
tion of all others. They must have a cen-
tral theme, carried out to a logical conclu-
sion, and the character-drawing must be
true, not necessarily to the period so much
as to all humanity, its motives and its emo-
tions, its aims and ambitions, and its striv-
ings for a higher level. For myself, the writ-
ing of a historical story does not attract me.
I prefer the incidents and the people whom
I find dwelling near me, whom I meet in
clubs and hotels and in the parlors of my
friends, whom I see upon the streets of my
own city, on railway trains, and in distant
places, and it seems to me that if one can
write truthfully and well of these familiar
things, if he can reflect with fidelity the ani-
mating spirit, the customs, and the every-
day life of his own time, he will be writing
the true historical story; that is, the story
which in the future shall be regarded as of
value and interest for its historical fidelity,
in addition to its interest as an episode in
the never-ending drama of the human soul.

89

Dialect Stories

Whatever else you do, be careful
of dialect. Mere "freak" spell-
ing by no means makes dia-
lect, which is the easiest of all things to
overdo. It should only be used where ab-
solutely necessary, and then with the ut-
most caution. Every phonetically spelled
word which deviates from the normal
should be said aloud and listened to with
a trained ear, to make sure that it repre-
sents exactly the required sound. Discard
nearly all of the conventionally misspelled
and frequently used words which have come
to represent Irish, German, Hebrew, Negro,
and other racial speeches. In the ordinary
"comic dialect," in nine cases out of ten,
these are more or less absurd exaggerations.
Unless you are thoroughly familiar with Ne-
gro character and have been in close and

90

intimate enough contact with these half
childlike, half savage people to know per-
fectly their modes of speech — and thought
— do not, in the name of all consistency and
logic and sanity, attempt to write Negro
dialect. The same applies to all other like
cases. Dialect is seldom necessary to the
sustainment of the human interest of a
story, and the color it adds is better left out
unless it is well done.

Where one succeeds in dialect work, a
thousand fail. It requires a very musical
ear to detect and analyze the variation in the
pronunciation of words which makes dialect,
and it requires an intimate knowledge of
every living and thinking habit of the race
or district under consideration to know the
characteristic words in use; and this, after
all, is not only the live spirit of dialect, but
its main divergence, even more important
than mere differences of pronunciation. Un-
less you are sure that you can do these things
in absolute perfection, let them entirely
alone and turn your attention to something
else.

9i

Stories Not to be Written

A void, by all means, the morbid and
ILl the gruesome. There is no de-
■*■ ^ mand for them. It is doubtful if
Poe could to-day place in a good, well-
paying market his marvelous stories. As a
nation we want and demand cheerfulness.
Last, but not least, avoid the salacious and
the impure as you would poison. Aside
from the moral aspect, there is no money in
this sort of writing, notwithstanding the tre-
mendous success of "Three Weeks," which
at the time of penning this treatise is the
latest notable putrescence to assail the nos-
trils of the reading public. Where one story
of this sort succeeds, innumberable others
fail, and justly so. After all we are a whole-
some people; perhaps none more so in the
world. Moreover, while a success of this
sort might be possible in a book, in a mag-
azine it is entirely out of the question. No
magazine which will pay worth-while prices

92

will purchase stories of this type. Let them
alone entirely. Do not allow yourself to
run away with the idea that they are artistic.
The most artistic things in the world are
the cleanest. The time has gone by when
it was considered »that artists, musical com-
posers, and authors must necessarily be of
unclean lives or of unclean thought. The
most successful artists in every line to-day,
and those the artistic excellence of whose
work most deserves success, are the cleanest
of habit and of mind, and if you want to
court professional failure and personal mis-
ery, try deviation from the wholesome prin-
ciples of right living and right thinking
taught in the Bible or in any other code of
ethics upon which a great and permanent re-
ligion has been founded. I speak this not as
one who would preach, but as a practical
man who has seen nearly all modes of life,
and whose judgment, which he feels to be
not entirely an unripe one, has picked out
positively the best; and remember that, no
matter how painstakingly you try to dis-
guise it, your true self will show through
your writing.

93

Construction

A short story can not attempt to take
in the entire scope of a novel, nor
could any good novel be shorn of
its extraneous matter and condensed into
the compass of a short story. A novel
may comprise in its pages the detailed
history of a lifetime, the growth and dis-
integration of a nation, the improvement
or retrogression of a world. The short
story must be confined to a single inci-
dent. A short story should be to the
novel what a song is to an opera. Some-
times the song may be better than the wliole
balance of the opera which contained it, and
may be remembered longer. A novel may
be roughly compared to a landscape paint-
ing in which a beautiful tree is the most im-
portant figure, and the short story would,
following the analogy, be a painting of the
tree itself. The whole import of the book

94

"Ben Hur" could not be compressed into the
limits of a short story, but the chariot race
of Ben Hur, with some trifling work to re-
model the rough edges where it has been
torn from its setting, would make a magnifi-
cent short story. Get this difference fixed
clearly in your mind before you attempt to
write. You must have one clearly defined
episode about which everything must cen-
ter. The plot may be as elaborate as you
like, but never for one moment may you for-
get that it must all revolve about or lead
up to a single climax. Miner episodes, it is
true, it may have in plenty, but these must
never be used unless they are illustrative of
or contributory to the main episode.

It is only within the last two or three
decades that this really new phase of liter-
ary accomplishment has developed to its
present pre-eminence. The short story in
its modern development is an entirely dis-
tinct creation, differing as much from the
early efforts of Boccaccio and his ilk as the
verse of Kipling differs from the epics of
Homer. There is no ground of comparison
because they are of an entirely different

05

genus. It is as H. H. Wells put it, when
asked to decide which he thought the bet-
ter of two excellent but entirely dissimilar
stories.

"It is absurd," he said. "It is like asking
me which I like the better; butter or but-
tercups."

The early short story was the narration
of a mere passing incident, the event of a
day or a night. It was only the part of a
story. The modern short story has a be-
ginning, a purpose, and a climax. It com-
prises within its brief expanse clean, clear
character-drawing, and may, like the novel,
cover the entire career and purpose of a life-
time, but, unlike the novel, it must convey
the impression of this lifetime through the
illustrative episode which forms the entire
backbone of the story. The modern devel-
opment has action, description, and logical
construction, and all the elements which
used to make the successful old-fashioned
novel, but made tense and terse by the elimi-
nation of all but one illuminative climax.

In your early practice skeletonize your
story. Think it over well and shear of all

96

its extraneous and contributory phases the
dramatic or other episode which is to be
your climax. Express this on paper in as
few terse words as possible. Add to this,
then, in brief, separate sentences the epi-
sodes which are to lead up to your climax.
When you have a clear and definite under-
standing of what you are about to do, se-
lect the names of your characters and their
scenic environment and invest them in your
own mind with a living, breathing person-
ality. Then start your story. If you invest
your characters with this personality before
you have studied well the construction, the
people whom you have created will take the
bit in their teeth, will run away with your
story, and destroy your theme. Inciden-
tally they may make a better story out of it
than you would have done, but this will
scarcely happen in your earlier efforts.

97

The Beginning

Having selected your story and being
quite sure that you have a story to
tell, proceed as an old newspaper
man once told me was the proper way to
write news items. Begin in the middle, and
write both ways. By that it is meant that
you must make some almost startlingly in-
teresting statement at the beginning of
your story. Make your first page, your
first paragraph, your first sentence, your
first words, if possible, so absorbing that
they will force the attention of the reader,
and carry it through to the end of what
you have to say. The trick is compara-
tively simple. Do not write an introduc-
tion.

By way of illustration I am going to pre-
sent the beginning of a half dozen of my
own stories. It might have been more mod-
est to select those of other writers, to give
you examples from Poe and Hawthorne,

98

from Flaubert and De Maupassant, from
O. Henry and Robert W. Chambers, but,
after all, I am much more familiar with
my own work, and it follows, too, as nearly
as I can make it, the principles in which I
firmly believe.

To begin with, here follow the first three
hundred and eighty-nine words of the man-
uscript of "Selling a Patent," one of a se-
ries of the adventures of one J. Rufus Wal-
lingford which were first published in the
"Saturday Evening Post" and afterwards
incorporated into a book under the title of
"Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford:"

A fussy little German, in very
new looking clothes which fitted
him almost like tailor-made, rushed
back to the gates of the train-shed,
where the conductor stood with his
eyes fixed intensely upon his watch,
his left hand poised ready to wave.
"I left my umbrella," spluttered
the passenger.

"No time," declared the autocrat,
not gruffly or unkindly, but in a
tone of virtuous devotion to duty.
99

The little German's eyes glared
through his spectacles, his face
puffed red, his gray mustache bris-
tled.

"But it's my wife's umbrella!"
he urged, as if that might make a
difference.

The brass-buttoned slave to duty
did not even smile. He raised his
hand, and in a moment more the
potent turn of his wrist would have
sent Number Eighteen plunging on
her westward way. In that mo-
ment, however, the Pullman con-
ductor, waiting with him, clutched
the blue arm of authority.

"Hold her a second," he advised,
with his thumb pointed far up the
platform. "Here comes from a dol-
lar up for everybody. He 's rode
with me before."

The captain of Eighteen gave a
swift glance and was satisfied.

"Sure. I know him," he said of
the newcomer, then he turned to
the still desperately hopeful passen-
ioo

ger and relented. "Run!" he di-
rected briefly.

The gentleman who has secured
for Carl Klug this boon, merely by
an opportune arrival, was not hur-
rying. He was too large a man to
hurry, so a depot porter was doing
it for him. The porter plunged on
in advance, springing heavily from
one bent leg to the other, weighted
down with a hat box in one hand,
a huge Gladstone bag in the other,
and a suit case under each arm.
The perspiration was streaming
down his face, but he was quite con-
tent. Behind him stalked J. Rufus
Wallingford, carrying only a cane
and gloves; but more, for him,
would have seemed absurd, for
when he moved the background
seemed to advance with him, he
was so broad of shoulder and of
chest and of mid-girth. Dignity ra-
diated from his frame and carriage,
good humor from his big face,
wealth from every line and crease
101

of his garments, and it was no mat-
ter for wonder that even the rigid
schedule of Number Eighteen was
glad to extend to this master of cir-
cumstances its small fraction of
elasticity.

In this space, which was the beginning
of a story running to the unusually cum-
bersome length of twenty thousand words,
five clearly defined character portraits are
suggested: the German passenger, a train
conductor, a Pullman conductor, a depot
porter, and J. Rufus Wallingford, who is
the central figure of the story. The Ger-
man is the man whom Wallingford pro-
ceeds to rob of his patent on a sales-re-
cording device; but three of the characters
— the train crew — never appear again; and
while these are graphically enough pic-
tured, close analysis will show that they are
not as carefully drawn as the two leading
characters. They are only described as to
the general characteristics of conductors and
porters, being left indefinite as to facial and
bodily characteristics so that the reader may
form his own pictures of them. To have

102

described them more accurately would have
been to have fixed them too firmly in the
minds of readers; they would then have re-
mained in the memory and have excited a
lingering wonder as to when they would ap-
pear again.

In this beginning action is started at
once. The picture is one that has life and
motion. Moreover, the background is one
with which nearly all people are familiar.
There is a hint, too, that the man Walling-
f ord is a "smooth" individual, and not overly
scrupulous.

Let us go over the first paragraph again:

A fussy little German, in very
new looking clothes which fitted
him almost like tailor-made, rushed
back to the gates of the train-shed,
where the conductor stood with his
eyes fixed intently on his watch, his
left hand poised ready to wave.

At the very outset and within a few
words two characters and immediate action
are introduced, and the reader is interested
at once, if he is going to be interested at all.

103

The next example is the beginning of a
story called "Skeezicks," published in "Mc-
Clure's Magazine :"

"Does Master Charles Edward
Freeman, Esquire, live here?" po-
litely asked Uncle Joe, pausing in
mock hesitation.

The small boy on the gate-post,
who had been idly drumming his
heels against the smooth wood, at
once checked back his smile of
greeting, ready for any amount of
serious pretense.

"Yes, sir," he answered, with
equally grave courtesy.

"And is the gentleman at home?"
Uncle Joe was anxious to know.

"No, sir," replied the boy, not
even the suspicion of twinkle in his
inscrutable eyes.

"No?" inquired the young man
in surprise. "It 's really too bad
that he is away, for I wished to
see him on rather particular busi-
ness not unconnected with choco-
late creams. Please tell him that
104

I called, will you?" And Uncle Joe
slowly moved on.

That broke the combination.

"Uncle Joe!" cried an eager
voice, childish this time and quite
unlike the one that had been used
up to this point. "Come back,
Uncle Joe ! I 'm Charles Edward
Freeman, but really and truly I 'm
not at home, you know, because
I 'm right here on the gate-post."
This with a gleeful laugh.

Uncle Joe returned, but uncon-
vinced.

"You do n't mean to claim that
you are Master Charles Edward
Freeman, Esquire, do you?" he de-
manded.

"Yes, sir." The boy was again
gravity itself.

"Nonsense ! Why, it 's quite im-
possible. Charles Edward Free-
man is a regular six-foot-two name,
with a plug hat and a cane and
other trimmings. I 'm certain
you 're not six foot two. Jump
105

down here and let me measure
you."
The entire whimsical nature of what is
to follow is foreshadowed in these para-
graphs, and two of the three main charac-
ters are introduced at once.

The next example is from "The Strike
Breaker," also published in "McClure's:"
Young Tremont paused to light
a cigar, but, as he did so, he cast
a quick glance down the dark alley
opposite which he stood. It was
just as well to be cautious. At first
the alley- way seemed empty, but as
the match flared up and the end of
his Havana caught the fire, a rough
figure came from behind the big
telephone pole. Instantly Tremont
dropped his hands into his overcoat
pockets. As the figure came to-

m

ward him, the muzzles of two con-
cealed hammerless pistols were
pointing straight at it, a cool finger
on each trigger.
Again, in the first paragraph, a back-
ground picture, a hint of character-drawing,
106

and action, always action. In this, too, ob-
serve that in very few words the reader is
given a distinct imagery of the surround-
ings. Read it over and you will see that
there is no description whatever. There is
a mere mention of a dark alley mouth with
a telephone pole in it, and yet I venture to
say that after the reading of that paragraph
you had a vivid mental picture of the entire
scene. The point is that only the impres-
sion of the scene was given and you supplied
all the missing details from your own imag-
ination and your own memory of such lo-
calities.

Below is the first paragraph of "Move
On," a story published in "Munsey's-:"
Along about midnight, a man
with his head bent and his shoul-
ders huddled against the biting
cold, turned from the railroad track
and limped painfully back to the
brickyard, where the smoke from
thick, squat chimneys glowed red
and promised warmth. As he en-
tered the lane of sheds he saw a
lantern come swinging up from the
107

other end, and hid himself in the
shadow of a pile of clay-hung lum-
ber. The watchman stalked by,
whistling cheerfully. Out of the
corner of his eye he saw the va-
grant as the gleam of the lantern
flashed upon him, but he paid no
attention; he did not want to see
the man. He was a big, bluff,
hearty fellow who had known cold
nights himself.

Here is the same principle; to begin pre-
cisely as if the reader were familiar with all
the preceding circumstances, to leave out all
the uninteresting details, and to proceed at
once with the groundwork of the story. In
other words, your characters are introduced
at a moment when they are already in ac-
tion, and the story is under way at the mo-
ment you meet them.

Next follows the beginning of "Fanchon
The Lobster," published in the "Saturday
Evening Post," a story of entirely different
type from any of the others, but introducing
the two leading characters, Pierre Piquard

108

and the remarkable lobster, and both in
action:

Oh, it was an admirable lobster!
Excellent! Per-fect! Pierre Pi-
quard gesticulated with joy, both
plump, white hands clasped before
his throat, even while Francois ges-
ticulated with pain. There had
been other lobsters which had ar-
rived sturdily protesting after their
long and tiresome journey from the
east, but none with the tremendous
vitality — and spirit! — of this one.
The moment Francois, used to the
feeble and sluggish movements of
the creatures, had thrust down his
hand, there came a swift move-
ment and click, and behold, from
one lean finger of the dancing Fran-
cois dangled the entire weight of
the beast!

The beginning of "The Making of Bobby
Burnit," published as a series of stories in
the "Saturday Evening Post," afterwards as
a connected book, and then turned into a

109

play, is slightly different because it intro-
duces a character who, though one of the
leading personages in the "cast," is dead be-
fore the story begins. It is attempted in
this, however, to present an interesting and
unusual situation in the very first paragraph,
and the manner in which "Bobby" has been
accepted by the public would lead to the be-
lief that this was accomplished.

"I am profoundly convinced that
my son is a fool," read the will of
old John Burnit. "I am, however,
also convinced that I allowed him
to become so, by too much absorp-
tion in my own affairs and too lit-
tle in his, and, therefore, his being
a fool is hereditary; consequently
I feel it my duty, first : to give him
a fair trial at making his own way,
and second: to place the balance of
my fortune in such trust that he
can not starve. The trusteeship is
already created and the details are
nobody's present business. My son
Robert will take over The John
Burnit Store and personally con-
no

duct it, as his only resource, with-
out further question as to what else
I may have left behind me. This
is my last will and testament."

That is how cheerful Bobby Bur-
nit, with no thought heretofore
above healthy amusements and Ag-
nes Elliston, suddenly became a
business man, after having been
raised to become the idle heir to
about three million dollars. Of
course, having no kith nor kin in
all this wide world, he went imme-
diately to consult Agnes. It is
quite likely that if he had been sup-
plied with dozens of uncles and
aunts he would have gone first to
Agnes anyhow, having a mighty
regard for her keen judgment, even
though her clear gaze rested now
and then all too critically upon him-
self.

Practice beginnings conscientiously, and
your time will not be wasted, for when you
have a good beginning you are almost cer-
tain to build good stories.

in

Development

I have attempted to show that an intro-
duction should, above all things, in-
clude in some way the idea of motion,
and particularly visible motion; that the
nature of the story should be foreshadowed
in it, and that the plot should begin at
once, without tedious explanation or de-
scription. The development of the story
must proceed with equal swiftness. Bear-
ing constantly in mind the climax which
makes your story worth telling, proceed to-
ward it as soon as you have your ground-
work laid, your characters introduced, and
the minor episodes relating to introduction
out of the way. It is not meant that you
should leave out all the interesting details
which go to the making of color. Write
these as fully as you like, remembering
that it is always easier to cut out than to
supply new material, but be very sure, in

112

your revision, that you do not let stand
any color which clogs the definite onward
sweep of your narrative.

Let me refer back to the tales of which
the beginnings have been given in the pre-
ceding pages, in order to show how simple
is the outline of a short story.

In "Selling a Patent," Mr. Wallingford
persuades Mr. Klug that the way to sell a
patent to a monopoly is to form a manufac-
turing company, and by competition compel
the monopoly to buy him out. He joins with
Mr. Klug in the forming of this company
and immediately proceeds to bankrupt it,
forcing all its property and other valuable
considerations, including the patent, to a
sheriff's sale, in which he buys up the patent
for "a song," having previously arranged to
sell it to the monopoly at a good price. That
is the skeleton. The means he employed, the
various people with whom he associated, are
the details, but the detail is never allowed to
overshadow the story, which ends precisely
upon the climax of Wallingford's securing
possession of the patent.

In "Skeezicks," through a whimsical con-
"3

versation with Uncle Joe, Skeezicks gains
the idea of buying an engagement ring for
a young lady of whom he thinks a great deal
and with whom Uncle Joe is in love. Upon
the eve of her departure for Europe, just as
Uncle Joe is going to propose, he sees Skee-
zicks* engagement ring, an imitation dia-
mond, upon her finger. He has just met his
rival coming away from the house and im-
mediately jumps to the natural conclusion,
upon which he remains silent. After she
has gone away Skeezicks inadvertently lets
slip the fact of his purchase of the ring,
and Uncle Joe follows the young lady upon
the next train. The story ends with a tel-
egram, presumably signed by Skeezicks,
which states that Uncle Joe is coming to
trade rings. All there is to plot is told in
the above sentences, but the story occupied
an approximate seven thousand words in the
telling. This was all color and contributory
incident, every bit of which went toward the
building up of the climax.

In "The Strike Breaker'* the figure ap-
proaching Tremont in the dark is Lanigan,
a striker who wants to come back to work
114

as a "scab," though he is an ardent union
man, because his wife and boy are sick.
Tremont accepts him gladly, since his fight
against the strikers is likely to fail because
he can not get a competent engineer. Lani-
gan comes into the factory, which is prac-
tically in a state of siege, has his life heavily
insured, becomes the backbone of Tremont's
strike-breaking organization, and later, over-
come by the thought of the want and misery
which his action is causing the families of
his brethren of the union ranks, resigns and
goes out among the vengeful mob surround-
ing the factory to explain that he has quit.
He is shot by an enemy in the crowd. The
story ends abruptly upon the death of Lani-
gan, it being told long previously that his
wife and child are well provided for and
have moved to the country, amid healthy
surroundings. That story, as published,
counted ten thousand words, a length sel-
dom permitted by any magazine.

The next story, "Move On," is merely an
episode wherein a man, reduced to the ranks
of tramping because he is unable to find
work within the scope of his ability, is com-

"5

pelled to move on, though starving and half
frozen, from city to village and from village
to farm, and from farm back to village and
city, the climax coming when at last, a mis-
erable outcast, and most forbidding and re-
pellant-looking, he finds the man who, in his
rough way, takes pity on him and makes
him a human being again. There is scarcely
any trace of plot to this, and yet it required
five thousand words to form sufficient con-
trast to make the climax of rest sufficiently
strong.

In "Fanchon the Lobster," a tale of ab-
surdity, the lobster is made a pet by Pierre
Piquard. A fellow countryman insists upon
having that lobster cooked for his dinner.
He forcibly seizes it and plunges it in a pot
of boiling water. Pierre, the chef, then, out
of revenge, prepares a sauce for the lobster
which makes the incontinent diner die of
acute indigestion. The diner was a stranger,
and Pierre paid his funeral expenses so that
he might go out on splendid Sunday morn-
ings and lay wreaths of water-cress upon the
grave of Fanchon.

In "The Making of Bobby Burnit," Bobby
116

loses control of his father's business through
a consolidation with a rival, a stock com-
pany being formed and Bobby being voted
out of an influential position, or even divi-
dends on his holdings, because, in his igno-
rance, he permitted his rival, who was also
his father's old enemy, to obtain possession
of a' majority of stock. Afterwards, with
the help of his trustee, who proves to be
Agnes Elliston, the girl with whom he is in
love, he is able to regain control. This sen-
tence tells exactly what he did, but how he
did it is the interesting part.

These brief examples are given to show
the simplicity of plot to which a short story
must necessarily be confined. If you have
a story in mind, skeletonize it as briefly as
these have been outlined before you begin;
but it is not wise to attempt to minutely plan
all the detail, for if you are fertile enough
to write good stories at all, you will find
that a curious psychological process begins
almost as soon as you start to write; both
your characters and your situations, more
or less, act almost as if endowed with inde-
pendent life and intelligence. They will ut-

117

terly refuse to follow the rigid lines you have
laid down for them, and will work out side-
plots and incidents and situations of their
own.

Suppose your story to be precisely as the
last one mentioned; how a young man lost
his business through lack of knowledge of
stock company manipulation, and how he
regained it with the assistance of his "best
girl." You will have a more or less definite
idea of the exact steps by which this is to
be done, but when you have finished your
story you will find it entirely different, in the
majority of cases, from the one you set out
to write. You may have followed your skel-
eton exactly, but your detail will be very
different from that which you intended, and
if you are gifted at all in the writing way,
the altered result will be much better than
the original could have been.

\

iig

The Ending

Above all things, quit when you are
iJk through. Stop exactly on your cli-
■*■ "^ max. If you deem it necessary to
tell what became of your characters after
the ending of the story, hint at it, or
prophesy it, before you reach your dra-
matic ending. Do not shoot off a solitary
remaining Roman candle after you have
displayed your grand, final set piece.

119

Description

Some description is, of course, vitally
necessary, but leave out all lengthy
delineations of people, of places, of
scenery. Scattered information about these
through the story when they are positively
needed, but sketch them in very briefly, sug-
gesting just enough of general outline to
let the imagination of the reader build up
for himself the missing detail. If you must
write description, write it. Be painstak-
ing about it; show that your observation
is keen and sympathetic; go over the work
and polish it; get it so that it is really a
poetic gem told in musical prose ; then, hav-
ing gloated over it to your heart's content,
throw it away. It is only a clog upon the
swing of your narrative.

The above, of course, refers to descriptive
passages as applied to short story writ-
zrig. If you mean to do descriptive writing

120

— if you have a strong natural inclination
for it — that, of course, is a different matter.
It is not meant here to decry descriptive
writing, which is an art well worth culti-
vating, but merely to insist that description
of any length has no place in the short story.
Every short story writer should be able to
write minutely detailed description, if for
no other reason, to be able to judge what
to leave out in condensation. This is largely
a matter of observation, of logical arrange-
ment, and of rhetoric, and separate practice
in this will well repay the effort.

121

General Observations

Confine yourself as much as possible
t to definite action, and to conversa-
tion which is in itself both vital
and interesting. Insert conversation very
early in your pages. Some stories will
not permit of this, but in the majority
of cases if the first page of your manu-
script contains no quotation marks, that
is, no directly important speech delivered
by one of your characters, you had best
remodel your story to introduce conversa-
tion much earlier. There is a good mechan-
ical reason for this. A solid page of narra-
tive, especially at the beginning, looks very
dead to the reader. The eye, glancing down
the page, however, will catch a short sen-
tence set apart in quotation marks, and if
that sentence is a virile one, the reader,
glancing over the pages of the magazine
with no intention whatever of reading every

122

article in it, will go back to the introduc-
tion and begin the story which contains that
virile sentence. It is legitimate to take ad-
vantage of this trait in human nature. If
you have a message to deliver and can not
get a hearing for it, you might as well not
be possessed of the message. You must re-
member, too, that the same device which
will catch the eye of the reader of a maga-
zine will catch the eye of the person who
reads your manuscript. It is a part of the
art of story-telling to take advantage of all
the little points which will render what you
have to say more interesting.

Do not indulge in philosophy or com-
ment except very, very briefly, and only
when necessary to explain character. Even
then your drawing may be much better ac-
complished by action or a terse bit of speech.

Be sure that you are in earnest; be sure
that you believe what you say; be sure that
your story is true in every particular, true
in logic, true in character-drawing, true to
the best instincts that are in you. No hu-
man being must be the worse for a line

123

that you write. If you have a gift you
must not prostitute it. Perhaps all of us
who have written have penned stories for
which we are sorry, but if the constant at-
tempt is put forward to produce the best
there is in you, the general average is bound
to tell, and the effort is certain to have its
bearing upon your standing in the story-
telling field.

124

Condensation

This part of the "editing" is so im-
portant that it has been deemed
wise to consider it separately.
After you have finished, go over your
story and cut out ruthlessly every unneces-
sary word, sentence, paragraph; every un-
necessary page! Ask yourself, about each
individual atom of your story, "Is this vi- j
tally necessary to the painting of my pic-
ttflre, the unfolding of my plot, the develop-
ment of my climax ?" If it is not, cross it
out. If you follow this rule strictly you
will find that you have destroyed most of
your pet passages, your flowery descrip-
tions, your philosophical deductions, your
keen character analyses, but you will prob-
ably have saved your story from the waste-
basket. Too much stress can not be laid
upon this matter of condensation. More

125

good stories are probably ruined by begin-
ners through the fault of diffuseness than
through any other cause.

It is not meant that anything vitally nec-
essary or interesting should be cut out to
make your story shorter, but only that the
unnecessary things should be shorn away.
Unnecessary descriptions, unnecessary con-
versations, even unnecessary episodes will
be found, upon careful editing. Some of
these things you will think that you have
expressed most neatly, and it will be diffi-
cult for you to let them go, but subject them
to the one rigid test of whether they are
absolutely essential to the development of
your story. If they are not, you might save
them with the idea of using them in some
place where they will be more apropos, but
in any event do away with them. This,
during your apprenticeship. Later, after
you have gained facility and judgment and
insight, you may take liberties with this
rule and permit to remain passages and per-
haps incidents not exactly needful, but that
are in themselves attractive enough to pay
for the space they take up; but your judg-

126

ment as to this, in the beginning, will not
be very certain, and it is best to hold very
rigidly to your main theme. If you become
proficient in writing, and find a market for
your ware, and stay in the profession per-
manently, as the years pass on you will
find yourself leaving out extraneous matter
in the first writing, but it is almost impos-
sible to do this at the start; there are too
many temptations to take attractive by-
paths. A good rule is to count the words
after your story is written, cut out one-
third, rewrite it so as to have clean copy,
then cut out all you can additionally.

127

Length of Stories

In this place the proper length of short
stories might be mentioned. Seven
thousand words, by a known writer,
is the utmost limit that is permissible in
the average magazine, and even then the
story must be one of most exceptional
merit; but it would be almost fatal to
his prospects for the beginner to offer a
story of over five thousand words. Three
thousand is a much better length, and the
amateur will find a more ready accept-
ance for even a two-thousand-word tale.
Almost any editor who would hesitate
over a three or four-thousand-word manu-
script would find space for one of equal
merit of two thousand words, and be glad
to get it; for there is a dearth of this length
story. It requires much more skill to write
an acceptable two-thousand- word story than
one of seven thousand. Stories of from six

128

or seven hundred words to a thousand are
also eagerly sought by many magazines
which have a separate department for
sketches of this length. These sketches are
excellent practice, too. They should be con-
fined merely to a dramatic climax and such
absolutely necessary details as explain it
and throw it into relief. Some few publica-
tions will accommodate stories of almost
any length if of exceptional merit. If they
are too long they are run as two installment
or even three installment stories, but the
drawback to this is that the market is so
restricted, and if the "Saturday Evening
Post" and one or two other publications
which use them should refuse your stories
of exceptional length, they stay upon your
hands; so it is best to hold rigidly in the
beginning to an absolute four-thousand-
word limit, keeping as much under that
length as possible.

129

Editing

This is of almost as much importance
as the building of the story itself.
Certain authors who turn out very
careful and very highly polished work, edit
and even rewrite their stories an infinite
number of times. This is largely a tem-
peramental matter. Writers with newspa-
per training can scarcely be brought to
do this, and in their case so many edit-
ings and rewritings are seldom neces-
sary, for the newspaper worker learns to
edit as he goes. The writer of this trea-
tise almost invariably has his stories typed
three times. The first typing is edited
I for both condensation and construction,,
but it would be better for the amateur
to do this in separate revision. The first
writing should be studied very carefully
for construction. It might be necessary to
alter almost the entire plot, to leave out or

130

put in episodes, conversations, and descrip-
tions. In the second editing the condensa-
tion should be done. The third editing
should be for polish, and in this the attempt
should be made to improve all descriptions
and conversations, to improve rhetoric and
diction, to express every thought more clev-
erly. A fourth transcription should then be
made on good paper for mailing, and this,
before it is sent away, should be gone over
very carefully for typographical errors. No
manuscript should leave your hand until it
is letter and comma perfect. No typograph-
ical slips, no careless typewriting should be
permitted, for these things have their un-
doubted influence. The question of how
many times you are to edit a manuscript,
however, depends entirely upon your nat-
ural instinct and habit of accuracy, and the
question is one which, after all, remains to
be solved in practice, with perhaps a sepa-
rate solution for each writer.

131

Preparing a Manuscript

By all means typwrite your offerings.
It would be very expensive to hire
this done, and might also be an
unwise investment; but small typewriters
can be bought very cheaply, and it is no
trick for any person with a trifle of pa-
tience to learn to operate one with suffi-
cient facility. Longhand stories, if leg-
ibly written, will be read, but the easier
you can make it for the manuscript reader
in the editorial office the more favorably
he will feel toward your offering. Of
course you will write only upon one side of
the paper, whether you are preparing your
manuscript in longhand or on a typewriting
machine. If the latter, double-space your
"copy," to allow of interlineations, and leave
a reasonably wide margin. Write your
name and address upon the first sheet, and
put the page number upon every page, to-

132

gether with the title of the story, so that if
the sheets become separated it will be easier
to identify them and reinsert them in their
proper places in the manuscript. It is not
advisable to tack manuscript together by
clips or fasteners of any sort. I have sent
out hundreds of manuscripts, and have never
fastened any of them together, and have
never had a sheet lost from any of them.
The reason for not binding them is that
manuscripts are most conveniently handled
by reading the first page and slipping it be-
hind the last one, reading the second page
and slipping that behind the first one, and
so on, so that after the last page has been
read and slipped behind the pack, the en-
tire manuscript remains first page up, as it
was before.

The rule about "mailing flat" has been
promulgated so often by publishers that, by
this time, it would seem everybody should
know better than to roll a manuscript.
From the experience of the writer, however,
in handling the "copy" of amateurs, all peo-
ple do not know this. Rolled manuscripts
will not be read. They will be returned

*33

without comment, no matter how good the
story is. If you want to know the reason
for this send away a rolled manuscript.
After it comes back from its two weeks of
tightly cramped wandering, try to hold it
open and read it, and you will discover this
to be almost a physical impossibility. Edi-
tors and manuscript readers are very busy
men, and they have not the time to struggle
with follies of this sort.

Use paper of the regulation size, approx-
imately eight and one-half by eleven inches,
and fold it, if you wish to save postage, the
proper size to go in a "legal" envelope. A
better plan is to fold it over just once. You
can secure, very cheaply, stout Manila en-
velopes of just the right size to accommodate
these half-folded sheets. When mailing a
manuscript in this way, a sheet of paste-
board, cut to the right size, should be en-
closed within it, unless the manuscript is
rather stiff, to keep it from bending and to
keep the corners from curling over. Still a
better plan is to send the manuscript per-
fectly flat, without folding at all. Envelopes

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of the proper size for this may be secured at
almost any stationer's shop, and sheets of
pasteboard, cut to the same size as the manu-
script, should be placed front and back,
slight rubber bands being placed around the
whole before insertion into the envelope.
This insures that your manuscript, clean
and unbent, will lie before the manuscript
reader as neatly as it lies before you after
you have finished it, and the psychology of
this fresh appearance is of just as much
value as if you went in to see a business
man neat and clean in place of rumpled and
unwashed. You produce a favorable impres-
sion upon him in the first place, and then
if you have anything worth while to say,
you have secured an audience prejudiced in
your favor. For this reason, after the re-
turn of a manuscript examine it critically,
and if it shows the least sign of wear, re-
copy it before you send it out again. This
seems a lot of work, but it pays.

Be sure that you prepay full first-class
postage, and enclose a like amount in a sep-
arate small envelope, the latter marked on

135

the outside with the information that it con-
tains stamps to a certain amount accompa-
nying such and such a story. Do not write
the editor a letter telling him how good the
story is. Any letter to an editor, unless he
has already accepted some of your stories,
or unless you know him personally, is en-
tirely useless. Your offering will rest
strictly upon its own merits. Have your
name and address on the first page of the
story; that is sufficient. The editor knows
to whom to return it if he can not use it,
or whom to pay in case he accepts it.

After you have your manuscript ready to
mail go over it once more. You may find
a place to substitute a better word for one
already used, to alter, at the last moment,
a phrase or a speech so that it will be more
to the point. You will invariably find some
commas that should have been left out or
places where some should be inserted; you
will find one or more misspelled words, due
to haste in writing, possibly, and other lit-
tle defects the correction of which will make
your offering more perfect. It might even

136

strike you that an entire page, or two or
three pages, should be rewritten. If so, do
not spare the pains, for in the long run this
care will pay you large dividends. No busi-
ness, and story-writing is a business, ever
succeeded without a minute and painstaking
attention to details.

137

Marketing

When your effort is ready, try to
market it. Do not pay any at-
tention to the criticism of your
friends ; do not bother them with your work.
They do n't know anything about it, and if
they did could not tell you. The only critic
for whose opinion you need at all care is
the public, and that public is fairly well un-
derstood by the men who buy manuscript.
Make up your mind to this fact ; you will
receive absolutely fair treatment. There is
no "clique" in the publishing business, and
it does not require a "pull" to obtain recog-
nition. I can not understand how this silly
idea of favoritism came about, unless it was
evolved by unsuccessful writers to soothe
their own sense of chagrin. I have met
most intimately nearly every editor in the
United States and have talked shop with
them, not only in their offices but in their
clubs, over luncheons and dinners, and I am

138

quite sure that there is no other business or
profession in the world which is more
frankly and honorably and openly con-
ducted. The only passport you need to the
courtesies and good graces of publishers is
to have written a good story, one that is
true in its analysis and protrayal of human
life. They are on the lookout all the time
for wholesome stories written entertainingly
and from a fresh angle, and once that story
is written, the entire profession extends to
you the right hand of fellowship and wel-
comes you among the elect. Aside from the
search for a new point of view, for fresh
treatment in handling, the magazines are
quite anxious to secure new writers because,
for the same grade or sometimes even a bet-
ter grade of stories, they pay the unpam-
pered ones much less than they do those
who have made their reputations. It is pre-
cisely the old law of supply and demand, as
potent here as it is in the sugar and salt
trade and I personally know that every
physically presentable manuscript is read,
not only dutifully but eagerly, in all the
magazine offices.

139

Be careful not to go to the wrong mar-
ket. Magazines are as different as people,
and what suits one will not suit another.
Study the different publications, and try to
decide to which one your story will be most
acceptable. The sort of material they are
already using is the sort they want. It
would be absurd to try to sell opera-glasses
to a blind man for his own use.

Do not be discouraged! When your
manuscript comes back it will no doubt be
accompanied by a printed slip of rejection.
This is the only criticism you may expect,
but it will be sufficient; you will know that
the story was not what was wanted. Study
it over, compare it with the stories that are
published in that magazine, and try to find
out why yours was not good enough. If
you find that point, eliminate it, and send out
your manuscript again and again and again,
going from the top down to the bottom of the
list of the more than thirty magazines now
buying material at prices which make writ-
ing worth while. My own first accepted
story went a weary round and brought a
ridiculously small price. My second I sent

140

to seven magazines before it was finally
taken, but it earned me five times as much
as the first. My stories now do almost no
traveling, and they bring me exactly forty
times as much as my first one, which, if you
stop to think it over, is a very fair explana-
tion of why the magazines are anxious to
find new writers.

If you can secure a foothold at all, the
business is quite profitable enough to en-
gage your earnest attention. Within the
year following the acceptance of your first
two or three stories your earnings will prob-
ably be large enough for you to give up any
other occupation and devote your time ex-
clusively to writing. You will be paid a
very small rate at first, but the rate is raised
very rapidly if your work remains uniformly
good. When your price comes up to five
cents a word you may call your earnings an
income, for you will be receiving from five
to ten thousand dollars a year, the mere fact
that you are obtaining the five-cent rate,
which is a very good one, insuring that your
work is enough in demand to keep you busy.
On top of this income, which, by the way,

141

like an income in any other business, is only
to be earned by continuous application, by
the keeping of regular office hours as it were,
there are the possibilities of book publication
and of dramatic rights ; and success in these
fields means a comfortable fortune.

What I have set down here comes as the
result of years of hard "grinding;" I only
hope that the result may be to make the
path easier for others. There is plenty of
room in the profession; come on up and be
one of us. If I knew of anything else help-
ful to say to you, I would say it, gladly. I
can do no better, or no more, I think, than
to recapitulate:

First, prepare to earn a living at some-
thing else for a time.

Second, test yourself thoroughly to see
if you have the necessary qualifications for
the profession.

Third, Work! Work all the time, be-
fore, during, and after your first success.
Just work. I wish I could make you realize
to the full just what it means to WORK!

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no

G 1 1912

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